Floridian sues Google for ‘fraud and perjury’

A Writ of Mandamus has been filed by Patrick Zuili in United States Court of Appeals in Florida. The lawsuit states in part:

Google’s Lead Counsel and Officer of the Court of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board has done an act of perjury by swearing false statements in his affidavit (Google’s Exhibit 1043) and also inside of an email by threatening the Patent Owner of financial sanction and by also including misleading information to the Patent Owner and therefore to the Board Google’s Exhibit 1040).

Expert Witness of Google Mr. Stephen Gray has provided his sworn testimony (Exhibit 1032). Mr. Gray as clearly done an act of perjury by giving a sworn testimony based on the false exhibits.

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Patrick Zuili is the owner of the Three US Patent No. 8,671,057, 7,953,667 and 8,326,763. Google has launched several CBMR proceedings, in an attempt to invalidate these three patents granted by USPTO. The PTAB instituted CBM2016-00008 against the ’057 patent, CBM2016-00021 against the ’667 Patent and CBM2016-00022 against ’763 Patent by exclusively relying on Google’s Exhibits, testimonies and declarations provided by Google. In its decision to deny Patent Owner to file Motion for sanction against Google, the PTAB ignored the dispositive evidence provided by the Patent Owner in support of tampering and acts of perjury.

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In a Forbes column titled “Google Must Answer Lawsuit For Manually Removing Websites From Its Search Index” Eric Goldman reports:

You’d probably be hopping mad if Google manually kicked your website out of its search index; and if you’re an SEO company and Google also kicked all of your clients out, you’d probably feel pretty litigious. But courts have repeatedly ruled that Google has virtually absolute discretion to decide what sites it indexes and how to present them, so any lawsuit over Google de-indexing is surely doomed…right? Not so fast, a Florida federal judge said.

The court summarizes the plaintiff E-ventures’s allegations:

on September 19, 2014, Google removed 231 of its websites from being displayed on Google or Google-affiliated websites because they had been identified as “pure spam.” Over time, 365 such websites were removed. As a result of these removals, plaintiff’s websites could not be located by anyone using the Google.com search engine. Plaintiff attempted to cause new websites to be listed in Google’s search results, but these new websites were rejected by Google because of their affiliation with plaintiff. Plaintiff alleges that the removal of its websites was inconsistent with statements published by Google in its “Removal Policies,” both in terms of what the Policy says and what it fails to say. Plaintiff alleges that Google’s public statements about its removal policy were false, deceptive, and misleading because they are inconsistent with what Google did to plaintiff, and identifies eight specific false statements. Plaintiff alleges that Google’s conduct towards it was motivated by anti-competitive reasons and to punish plaintiff for engaging in “pure spam” and not on the content of the websites.

Google moved to dismiss the lawsuit. The court rejected virtually all of Google’s arguments.

We will keep you informed as Mr. Zuili’s case moves forward.

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